Dolphins

roger at anatsg1.unil.ch writes:
> Look,
>> Dolphins are nice fishy looking things but frankly they are bloody
> stupid.
>> Flies, with their very tiny heads make a better job of looking after
> themselves than these "flippers'. Try sticking a harpoon into
> good old "Musca domestica"
>> Dophins have large brains because they use sonar and that requires a lot of
> computation. Same sort of thing is done everyday in hospitals around the
> world. It just requires a lot of hardware.
>> Stupid, they are just bloody stupid.
>
I ran across an interesting thing about dolphin brains last
year. Appparently their two hemispheres are alternately
active. The original reference was (if I remember correctly)
in Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" but I ran it down and
found it quite fascinating. EEG recordings showed delta wave
patterns in one hemisphere (sleep?) while the other was active
and vice versa. The supposition was that since they are
aquatic mammals, this was a mechanism to keep them moving at
all times; the organism as a whole never slept. The
possible implications for human hemisphericity are interesting.
I'd love to hear if anyone knows whether other species (aquatic
mammals or otherwise) do anything similar from someone out
there who studies this sort of thing.